Windmills of the Mind
by Jaywings
Summary: A collection of short, unrelated one-shots. Currently: "So this is what it's like to be underwater." Spoilers for Rhombus of Ruin.
1. A Dumb Kid Thing

A/N: Hi! I thought I might try starting up one of those one-shot collections, because this section is starved for fanfic and also I need to write Psychonauts fanfic. I also figured it might be good for me to write short, quick things once in a while instead of concentrating so hard on longfics.

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A Dumb Kid Thing  
_Pairings: _Light Raz/Lili

A cool night breeze ruffled the strands of hair that poked out from Raz's cap. He turned his face into it, resting both hands on the rough wooden beam he was sitting on and swinging his legs back and forth in the empty space beneath him. He'd always enjoyed the feeling of being high off the ground. Maybe that was the circus blood in him.

This was one of the highest accessible points in camp. Technically campers weren't _supposed_ to be up on the roof of the main lodge, but how could he resist when there were literally poles and tightropes leading right up to it? Besides, it wasn't as if he was in any danger. He knew how to fall from high places and not get hurt, even without his levitation bubble.

He braced his legs against the beam and leaned back to gaze up at the sky. It was an inky purplish-black dotted with stars and a jagged crescent moon. Last night the sky had been choked with clouds that resembled tortured faces. He had mentioned this to Agent Cruller, of course; Ford had mused that what he was seeing may have been influenced by his inner turmoil. It had been a crazy night, after all. Still, Raz wasn't sure he believed all that, but maybe there was something to it. There were no clouds at all in the sky now.

_Funny, you never struck me as the silent, sitting-around-brooding-about-things type._

That voice wasn't his. Raz turned around, already knowing exactly who he would see standing on the slanted roof behind him. He raised an eyebrow. "You need to get your thoughts under control, Lili. I can still hear them loud and clear."

"Oh, come on, you know I meant for you to hear that." Lili swatted his shoulder lightly. "This spot taken?"

He scooted over, allowing her to sit down next to him.

"So what are you doing out here?" she asked.

"Silently sitting around and brooding about things. What about you?"

Lili indicated the lodge with a nod. "Everyone's in the TV lounge watching the movie adaptation of the Psychonauts comics. It got pretty crowded in there and I wanted some fresh air."

Raz nudged her. "Oh, is that the only reason you came out?"

"I've seen that movie like five times."

"So… _that's_ the only reason?"

"Vernon was telling a story about a time he thinks he met one of the extras."

"And…"

"_And_ I was looking for you, brainiac!" Lili elbowed him. "We haven't really gotten a chance to just hang out or anything. So here I am."

Here she was indeed. Raz fell silent, continuing to mindlessly swing his feet back and forth as he trained his eyes on the ground and did his best not to look at the girl sitting next to him. The moonlight turned the edges of her hair silver.

Down by the wooden ramp leading up to the lodge, a skinny cougar paced back and forth. Raz's skin crawled at the sight of it—those cougars could set you on fire before you'd even seen them.

"It's nice out," Lili commented.

"Yeah…" Raz replied, still watching the cougar. "Kinda creepy, though."

"Well, yeah, it gets like that here every night. Especially with those things running around." Lili nodded toward the psi-cougar.

"I don't get why no one tries to do anything about them! The bears, too," Raz grumbled.

They went quiet again. Lili shuffled closer to him, resting against his shoulder. Raz was acutely aware of the side of his hand now brushing against hers and sending shivers through his arm. For a few moments all that could be heard were the chirp of crickets and the occasional sharp cry of the cougar patrolling the ground.

"Is it weird, talking to your dad about stuff now?" Lili asked after a minute.

"It's… different." Raz kept his eyes locked on the cougar. Maybe he should try setting it on fire from up here. Get in some target practice and also give the thing a taste of its own medicine. "Whenever we talked about psychic stuff before, he'd always just shut me down and tell me to practice the trapeze or feed the elephants. I always thought he hated me."

"Well from what you told me, your perception of him was pretty distorted."

"And apparently too bald." Raz let out a dry laugh. "I don't know, Lili. We've been at odds ever since I started showing psychic abilities and now suddenly he's here and accepts everything about me? And I always suspected he was psychic but I never knew for sure, and now…"

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. _And now he's here like there was nothing wrong at all. _"Was it really me the whole time? Was I the one pushing _him_ away?"

Only once the words were out did he realize he'd said them out loud.

Lili placed a hand on his leg and he cringed. "All that stuff last night…" she said, glancing away, "…that was pretty heavy. I wasn't really sure we'd all make it out of that."

Raz locked his gaze on the cougar again. "Yeah, no kidding."

"You have to know that your dad's proud of you. And you know… if you ever need to talk about stuff like this with someone, I'm here, okay?"

He narrowed his eyes, focusing, and felt his heart give a flip when the end of the cat's tail sparked and started smoking. The cougar yowled and spun around in a circle, spitting, and dashed off in the direction of the lake.

Lili snorted. "Nice one."

"Hey, it was like fifty feet away! That was pretty good for fifty feet!" Raz protested.

"Sure, whatever, you're just avoiding the subject." Lili shifted on the beam, taking her hand off Raz's leg and setting it down next to her again. Something near the ground caught her eye and she turned back to Raz. "Hey, look… fireflies."

He looked. Little dots of light were floating around the lampposts, fading in and out.

"Dad and I used to catch those in the summer when I was little." Lili leaned her head to the side. "Sometimes I'd end up having jars and jars of them sitting in my room at night. We always let them go in the morning. Did you ever do anything like that?"

Raz shrugged. "When I was really little I used to find trinkets and things that people lost or left behind when they left the circus for the day. I'd show them to Dad because I could pick up faint memories and feelings from them, and he always threw them away."

"Maybe he was just putting them in a lost and found or something."

"Yeah, maybe."

Lili turned to face him. "But you never caught fireflies?"

"Not as far as I can remember, no."

She took his hand in hers. "We need to fix that, then!"

Raz looked down at the fireflies doubtfully. "But that's so… childish. Shouldn't we be doing something more important? Like training or something?"

"Boy, would Sasha be proud of you!" Lili said in exasperation. When Raz smiled, she went on to say, "That's not a good thing! Come on, Raz, you can take a break from being Number One camper and go do a dumb kid thing with me."

He let out a puff of air. "Hey, I can be Number One camper and still do dumb kid things."

"Good! So let's go, hero."

"Can we name them after me, at least?"

"Jerk!" Lili let go of his hand, her brow furrowed in a fake scowl. "You can name the ones _you_ catch. Which might be like, three."

Raz sat up straighter. "That's how many _you'll _catch, you mean."

"Are you kidding? I'm gonna get five times more than you, circus-boy. You've never even done this before!"

"That's it, you're on!" Raz jumped off the beam, mentally forming an orange bubble that allowed him to hang in midair and float down to the ground. Lili landed next to him with her own pink bubble.

"Whoever has the most before someone catches us out here wins," Lili said as soon as her feet touched the dirt. "Go!"

Both of them ran to the lamppost, reaching upward and cupping their hands to catch the fireflies bobbing in the air. Raz caught two in his hand before one spread its wings and lifted back into the air.

"Ooh, there goes Raz, Jr.," Lili said. She had a ball of pink mental energy hovering between her hands, inside of which four or five fireflies buzzed around each other.

"You didn't say anything about being allowed to use powers," Raz accused. "That's not very fair… for you. Guess who has all his merit badges?" He formed his own ball of energy, going after fireflies with renewed gusto.

"Sure! Rub it in, why don't you?" Lili said, but her eyes sparkled pink with the reflected light of her energy bubble.

Suddenly it didn't matter who won. Not that it ever had, really.

Maybe he'd even "accidentally" let a few of his fireflies escape to give Lili a better chance.

"I swear if you let me win, I'm dragging you upstairs so you can sit and listen to the rest of Vernon's story," Lili warned, making Raz wonder if she'd managed to break through his mental shields and read his mind.

Nah… she just knew him that well. Better than anyone else he'd ever met.


	2. Isolation

A/N: Once upon a time (like two years ago) I started up one of those one-shot collection fics because I thought it looked like a fun idea and I didn't think it would be too hard to write little spur-of-the-moment ficlets on occasion. Then I only ended up writing one story, making it not so much a collection as like, just one fic. Well, here's another one, and hopefully there'll be more to come.

This takes place during Rhombus of Ruin.

I love to know what people think of my work, so if you read it and like it (or have constructive criticism) feel free to review :D

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_Sometimes isolation is a good thing. It can lead to… important discoveries._

For some reason these words—Sasha's message from the beginning of the summer camp session, given as a hint to help him locate the agent's hidden lab—were what ran through Razputin's mind that moment. He was peering through the wide-set eyes of one of the creepy, silent guards running this place, scrutinizing the watery surroundings outside the thick glass window with the full intention of finding a way to hurl his consciousness out into the sea.

Raz wondered if there was any truth to Sasha's words or if they'd been nothing more than a riddle. He certainly _felt_ isolated right now, and he was about to be even more so. He could only _hope_ it led to important discoveries.

A fat fish floated lazily past outside the window, its fins and tail flicking just enough to keep it level in the water.

_Aha!_

Raz caught its eye, braced himself only for a second for what he was about to do, and CV'd into its mind—leaving the weird underwater room full of disused dental chairs, the suspended form of Truman Zanotto, and his own immobile body far behind.

And the window covering closed behind him, cutting off any view of the room.

Every fiber in his body recoiled all at once at what he'd just done and his mind went white.

_WATER._

_**EVERYWHERE.**_

He could feel it, cold and heavy all over his borrowed body and he was fully _submerged_ for the first time in his life and if he was submerged then that meant he was _drowning_, didn't it?! He struggled against his bonds but he was stuck in a chair and he was also trapped in a fish and he couldn't move his own body and he couldn't move the _fish's_ body and he tried to breathe in even though he knew he shouldn't but was he gulping in water or air…?

Panic caused his clairvoyant bond to nearly snap; the invisible "thread" linking his consciousness to his physical form seemed to vibrate with the effort of keeping up the connection and he felt his body stiffen and take rapid, shuddering breaths, his hands tightening into vice-like grips on the armrests of the chair he was strapped to. Terror threatened to claw its way up his chest and he felt a tremendous _pull, _tugging him away from the fish and back down to where he belonged—the world darkened around him, and back in the room, his eyelids fluttered as if about to spring open—

Raz _pulled_ back.

_Calm down_, he told himself sternly, snapping back into the fish's mind. Down below his body was gritting its teeth. _Have to… calm down!_

He was caught in an internal tug-of-war, his inherent fear of the deep water battling with his sheer determination to save the others and himself for several seconds before he could form another thought. _Calm down! I'm not going to drown! I'm okay!_

Perhaps the fish he was inhabiting noticed a terrified foreign entity on the edge of its mind. It paddled in agitated circles, twisting and turning as if confused about which direction it wanted to go.

_C'mon, Raz, look! Just look! _he thought desperately. _There's no hand! There's no _hand!

It was true. The ghostly green form of the Hand of Galochio, usually waiting for him just under the surface of any water that was too deep for him to stand up comfortably, was nowhere to be seen.

_See?! I'm okay._

_I'm okay._

His body let out a long breath and his mind started to clear at last.

_I'm breathing. I'm breathing air. I'm okay._

_I'm not actually underwater._

…_Well, technically I am, but I'm not physically touching the water right now and I'm not going to think about anything else._

Gradually he felt his frantic heartbeat slow and his breathing steadied. The fish calmed down as well, bobbing idly once again.

_I'm literally inside a fish right now. The fish likes it down here. Right? Yeah, I'm okay._

The instinctive terror at finding himself underwater had all but ebbed away at last, and his body started to fall into a more relaxed state of unconsciousness. Or as relaxed as he could be after having woken up after a plane crash, underwater, alone, imprisoned with the person they'd been trying to rescue, and tied to a chair, anyway.

_I've gotten out of worse_, he assured himself. Now was not the time to get freaked out. He'd wasted enough of their likely precious time doing that already. Since he had no idea what had happened to the others it might be up to him to find them and figure out what to do next.

Feeling as though he'd inadvertently tortured this poor fish for long enough, he spotted another one and darted into its brain instead, and was finally able to take in his surroundings.

_So this is what it's like to be underwater._

It was beautiful. And also creepy.

He'd seen it before, of course, sort of. The bathysphere back at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp had taken him down to the floor of the lake, and there he'd been trapped in an enormous air bubble formed from some kind of mucus. It had been eerie down there—deathly quiet, with gross sea life like giant clams and sucker fish and huge, green-glowing coral formations everywhere. Not to mention there'd been the sprawling remains of the ghost town, Shaky Claim, hidden deep under the greenish water without betraying a trace of its existence to the surface. It was similar here, though instead of a town it was the rusty skeletons of vehicles and aircrafts of all different types and time periods, attached end-to-end in a spiral leading downward to the ocean floor where something large and orange glowed faintly. The heart of the Rhombus of Ruin.

_The Psilerium?_ Raz wondered, gazing down at it. If that's what it was, there was a _lot_ of it. Maybe just as much as—if not _more_ than—the amount of Psitanium buried underneath Whispering Rock. He hoped the fish wouldn't swim too close to it. But at the same time, heading down there might be his best chance of finding Sasha, Milla, and Lili.

Oh, and Coach, too.

What had happened to the jet, anyway? _Did it sink down to the bottom? _There was no sign of it among the forest of vehicles. It was gone, lost somewhere along the way.

Silence pressed in on all sides with an almost smothering feeling, making him feel oddly separated from the world around him. Strange, wasn't sound supposed to travel faster underwater than in air? Why did everything seem so muffled? He imagined it was very cold down here, too, but the fish didn't feel any of it. He spotted another one a little ways off and jumped into it.

Using clairvoyance on animals was always a strange experience. They saw the world in a completely different way than a human did, and their minds and emotions were simpler, making them in some ways harder to understand. His normal senses, other than sight, were dulled down from either the effects of his clairvoyance, or from the Psilerium, or because that's just how fish were. He could feel the lure of the Psilerium down below, twisting his mind and calling him down to it like it had called the pilots and drivers of all these vehicles now buried down here among the coral, like moths to the flame.

Speaking of that, how were the fish around here affected by the Psilerium, anyway? Back at camp, a lot of animals living around the Psitanium deposits had developed psychic powers. Raz had run across telekinetic bears, pyrokinetic cougars, and rats that exploded into clouds of confusion. These fish seemed completely normal, though. They weren't anything special, they were just… sluggish. They sort of just bobbed in place and didn't swim around much like he assumed fish normally did. There were usually at least a couple lingering around nearby no matter where he went, and Raz hopped easily from mind to mind. Maybe instead of heightening mental activity in animals like the Psitanium did, the Psilerium diminished it.

He CV'd into another fish, suddenly finding himself enclosed inside a beat-up shark cage with the bars torn and bent like it had come under attack by something huge. He hadn't even seen it clearly through the murky, brownish water. Uneasily he jumped into a different fish farther along. How _had_ all these objects gotten here? Why hadn't the Psychonauts ever confirmed that the rumors surrounding this place were true? Even Sasha had thought they were made up, and Raz had been almost inclined to believe him despite Truman's warning, but now here was evidence to the contrary all around him.

He glanced up. Far above, far out of reach, he could see the surface, the water fading from rusty orange to pale green in color as it got closer to the sun.

He passed through an empty cargo container that may have fallen off a boat and found himself nearer to the Psilerium than before, as well as too-close proximity to way more sharks than he would have preferred.

The Psilerium was shaped like an enormous brain, somehow. And the sharks seemed to be doing the legless, underwater equivalent of pacing around a room in thought or boredom.

_Hope they're not hungry_, Raz thought warily. He wasn't sure what would happen if his fish was eaten while he was inside its brain. Probably nothing good.

Something familiar softly brushed against his mind. Someone he knew was close by!

On instant alert, Raz cast around for any sign of what he'd just encountered and located an old yellow school bus up ahead. His heart sank. Not a school bus… Hopefully all the kids had gotten out before it ended up here…

He CV'd closer and the presence he'd felt grew stronger, until he could see figures sitting in the bus—more of those weird guards.

_What the…_

Concentrating on the one sitting by the window closest to him, he entered their mind and realized at once that the bus was completely empty of water, and for some reason it was crowded with the guards.

"I need to save the children," a strained but familiar voice said.

Raz gasped at the sight of her in the driver's seat of the bus, desperately holding out her hand in the classic Psychonaut pose and struggling to hold back… _something_. Something that perhaps she alone could see.

_Milla!_

She didn't respond to his silent call, of course, and in fact she seemed to be in some sort of trance.

But she was alive. Perhaps the others were too.

He had no idea how any of them would make it out of this... but at least now he was no longer alone.


End file.
